In this week we document a place for 50 seconds. Before the shooting, we went through exposure, focus, and how to set up cameras on tripods and some safety rules. Based on what I learned last semester I am pretty familiar with these settings and rules. Here are some new things that l learned, when setting up a tripod, it is better and more convenient to use the first joint. When setting up the tripod, it is more like a one-person’s job, when there are two people there they might pay attention to different areas, and hands might get chopped badly. We kept shooting, we went to the basketball court and documented some events over there, like people sitting and chatting, people playing basketball,etc. Different from drama, the shooting of documentary is more like recording what is there without any rehearsal or staging. We are just recording this place, what are people doing here. So when we shooting, we are trying to find more interesting angles to show the place more to viewers. For example, one of us was shooting people sitting and chatting neat the basketball court, when she shoot this, she want to put the tall building with scrawl on it in the composition. We went out to record six different sounds to show what kind of environment you are in. We record the sound of coffee machine making coffee, the sound in an elevator, the sound of beeping at student hub, the sound of people walking and so on. All of those sound are like the symbol of different places, different environment.

When we look at the work we’ve done, we found that frame is the thing we can improve a lot. It seems like there is a basic rule for framing, tight it up or make it wide, and it depends on the objects that you focus on somehow. One thing about audio, the lead actor or the interviewee is always on channel 1. And when you do an interview, always record the interviewee’s answer first because this is unknown. The interviewer’s questions can be recorded anytime after the interview because it’s prepared and changeable.To find the nice frame for shots, we can check the location in advance and use our phone to make the frame. A mobile phone is a very convenient and good tool to do that. We can easily carry it from any angle we want.